Whether you've heard of it or not, Platform as a Service, or PaaS, is an emerging trend that is quickly giving way to thousands of mashups across the web and corporate Intranets. A new article in the E-Commerce Times entitled "The PaaS Era, Part 1: Everybody's Pounding Out Mashups" highlights the growth of mashups as web startups and established companies continue to open up their platforms to third party developers.